Dedicated to supporting world's green guardians of the wild

Martin Flanagan

SEAN Willmore has a strong, athletic build and a big grin to go with it. The first of his tattoos I notice, on his left calf, is a Celtic design of intertwined dogs. It's about loyalty, he says. Willmore's loyalty is to park rangers around the world, about 80 of whom are killed each year defending the world's last wild areas and their animal inhabitants.

Willmore is well known. He's been the subject of one Australian Story program and a significant contributor to another  a profile of Ben Potts, his roommate on the Sea Shepherd, who jumped aboard a Japanese whaler in Antarctic waters in 2005.

He also received a Royal Humane Society bronze medal for diving into the ocean and trying to save a drowning man off Squeaky Point in 1997.

After resigning his post as a ranger in 2007, he spent a year making a documentary film, The Thin Green Line, which has now been shown in 50 countries. The thin green line is made up of park rangers who protect our remaining wild habitat and its creatures from further depredation.

In 2008, Willmore gave a speech to a group of "millionaires and billionaires" at the Sydney Opera House. He asked those with red stickers on their seats to stand up. He then said, "You haven't won a lucky door prize. That's the number of rangers killed in the Congo over the last 10 years."

He was born at Sale but came to the Melbourne suburb of West Ivanhoe when he was an infant. A lot of his childhood was spent around Darebin Creek. When he was 13, two things happened that were to impact on his life. The first was that he dropped a can as he was walking by the creek and a bloke on a bike stopped and asked him if he knew what he was doing. "The dude wasn't rude to me or anything. He just asked me if I knew that the can was going to end up in the creek."

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The other incident happened one day when he was in the local library. Looking towards the city, he saw smog  filthy air. That, he says, is when the bubble of his childhood burst. "I saw the adults didn't have a grip on things."

Willmore, who includes a spell as a stand-up comic on his CV, speaks in a sort of semi-humorous slang. As a young man, he wanted to play AFL footy. Collingwood came and had a look at him but he "can't have been good enough". He did a science degree, majoring in botany, and got a job at Scienceworks in Williamstown where he learnt how to present to an audience. He then pestered Parks Victoria until they gave him a job as a ranger. "It was all I ever wanted to do."

He was at an international conference of park rangers in 2003 when a ranger from Malawi showed him the machete wound he had received in the course of his duties. Willmore was taken aback, but not so the Ugandan ranger present. He showed them his bullet wound. Willmore's resolve to take up the cause of park rangers around the world  particularly the cause of the families left behind when they are killed  helped end his engagement to wed. But it also put him into natural environments around the world with the people who, literally, guard them with their lives.

In the Congo, he went out with an anti-poaching squad carrying AK-47s. In South Africa, he was in a vehicle near a cliff top surrounded by a herd of elephants.

The herd's matriarch put her brow to the side of the vehicle and began to push. "It's amazing how getting close to death changes how you see things," says Willmore.

In Uganda, he found the widow of a ranger and her children who "had nothing" and gave her a year's salary ($1500). She thought he was some sort of god, that it was a miracle. "I had to explain it wasn't my money."

Willmore is a convivial man. Our interview ends up at his local, the Herro in Balnarring. When we first met, outside the Balnarring coffee shop, he insisted on taking me to the local hardware store, the administrative centre for the Thin Green Line Concert to be held next Saturday at Coolart wetlands in Somers. The owner of the store, Terrey McMillan, describes himself as "a four-wheel driver, a motorbike rider and a shooter".

Before meeting Willmore, McMillan regarded rangers as "spoilsports". "He's changed me and my mates," says McMillan. "He showed us a sensible way of doing things in the bush."

I ask him to describe Sean Willmore. "Ethical," he says.

Concert tickets available at www.thingreenline.org.au. One ticket equals a month's salary for the family of a ranger killed in Africa.